LSO/Gergiev

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Poor Oedipus. No analyst, no therapist: nothing for it but to pierce his eyeballs with a golden pin. And we felt it, as the consonants lacerated the line in the voice of Simon Callow, narrating Jean Cocteau’s text in the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex.

The narrator is all-important. He draws us into the horrors, and he sets us apart from them. Callow is musical enough to find the perfect tone: elevated, oratorical, and with the blade-edge of irony finely honed. He and the male voices of the London Symphony Chorus were the heroes of this antihero